summoning them online every night. Through its 6-month running, Dragon Raja accumulated 900,000 hits, and its publishing rights were soon taken by Golden Bough, an imprint of Minumsa Publishing Group. Beginning in May 1998, the novel was published in 12 paperback volumes. In the midst of his debut success, Lee began typing his second novel Future Walker, a sequel to Dragon Raja. Future Walker was serialised on the same forum from October 1998 to June 1999, and published in August by Golden Bough in 7 paperback volumes. Lee continued to use Hitel's serial forum for writing his novels such as Polaris Rhapsody, The Bird That Drinks Tears, The Bird That Drinks Blood and a few short stories. All of these stories were published upon completion (and deleted from the forum) or collected in later publications by Golden Bough, which remains Lee's publisher today. This practice of online serialization and getting published based on its popularity (estimated by the work's view counts) surged in fantasy, science, romance fiction in Korea. Online forums dedicated to these genres opened in hundreds by 2000 attracting prospective writers, and caused the boom of the Internet literature. Outside the forum he published a short story Over the Horizon as an e-book in 2000, and wrote a series of children's stories for RedPen study books published by Kyowon Co. Ltd. After Hitel The popularization of HTTP and the Web browser caused the decline of Hitel and other commercial online services, and Lee's readership on the forum was greatly reduced. But Lee continued to use Hitel forum to 2005, completing The Bird That Drinks Blood, the last of his multi-volume novels as of July 2014. After the forum was closed in 2007 Lee said in an interview that he was searching for a place to serialize his work online, saying that "the realtime feedback from the readers is a big joy, and I miss that feeling." But he found it difficult to find a replacement to the old text-only forum, which was "easier for [him] to access because [the forum]'s white text on blue limited one's expression to text, and it enabled [him] to show individuality purely through words." The web's increased sense of community and of the writer's presence thereby, made it more difficult for him. "I believe words and people are separate," Lee said, "some people may like a writing and want to find about the